Without addictive nicotine content in cigarettes and electronic versions, people would not be addicted and would not need to smoke.

The ‘95% safer’ NUTT biased pushers and PHE always state: it’s not the nicotine, it’s the combustion and tar.

As numerous new peer reviewed research articles appear on previously undiscovered pathogenic effects of vaping and nicotine, the likelihood of major lawsuits against PHE grows progressively stronger.

These recent findings (attached) show the way forward to researchers to discover how both nicotine and e-cig vapour, even without nicotine, adversely affect DNA or lead to cellular mutations, creating cancerous chemicals in the body like NNN and NNK, even though such chemicals were not present in the ingested e-cig vapour.

Such mutation evidence probably already exists within carefully hidden tobacco industry research using outside contractors. Time to offer a Bloomberg/Gates Whistleblower Bounty?

Detailed independent research concentration on e-cig vapour and nicotine effects on cellular level mutations in DNA could lead to a possible ban on nicotine by Governments = game over for Big Tobacco.

But research shows that when it comes to smoking, children are heavily influenced by some of the folks they consider the coolest of the cool: actors in movies.

“There’s a dose-response relationship: The more smoking kids see onscreen, the more likely they are to smoke,” said Dr. Stanton Glantz, a professor and director of the University of California, San Francisco, Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. He is one of the authors of a new study that found that popular movies are showing more tobacco use onscreen.

“The evidence shows it’s the largest single stimulus,” for smoking, he said; “it overpowers good parental role modeling, it’s more powerful than peer influence or even cigarette advertising.”

He said that epidemiological studies have shown that if you control for all the other risk factors of smoking (whether parents smoke, attitudes toward risk taking, socioeconomic status, and so on), younger adolescents who are more heavily exposed to smoking on film are two to three times as likely to start smoking, compared with the kids who are more lightly exposed.

Those whose parents smoke are more likely to smoke, he said, but exposure to smoking in movies can overcome the benefit of having nonsmoking parents. In one study, the children of nonsmoking parents with heavy exposure to movie smoking were as likely to smoke as the children of smoking parents with heavy movie exposure.

To Dr. Glantz, and the other people who study this topic, that makes smoking in movies an “environmental toxin,” a factor endangering children.

“There’s no excuse for continuing to have smoking in movies that are rated to be sold to kids, and so the policy objective we have is there should be no smoking in movies that are rated for kids,” said Dr. Glantz, who maintains a website called Smoke Free Movies. “The studios have it in their power to fix this with a phone call.” The rating system needs to start treating smoking like a proscribed obscenity, he said; if it’s in the movie, the movie gets an R rating.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s fact sheet on smoking in the movies estimates that taking smoking out of films rated for children would save 18 percent of the 5.6 million young people alive today who will otherwise die of tobacco-related diseases – a million lives. “There’s nothing you could do that would be so cheap and save so many lives,” Dr. Glantz said.

This has been studied in 17 different countries, he said, and though policies vary widely and cultures are very different, the results are remarkably similar. “You consistently see this two to three times risk in kids who are exposed to a lot of onscreen smoking, all over the world.”

Five years ago, the people who worry about the impact on the young of seeing smoking in the movies thought things were looking good. In movies rated for a young audience (that is, G or PG or PG-13), there had been a steady drop in the number of “onscreen tobacco incidents.” Not only that, but in 2012, convinced by a heavy array of scientific evidence, the Surgeon General issued a report saying explicitly that seeing people smoke in movies caused kids to start smoking: “longitudinal studies have found that adolescents whose favorite movie stars smoke on screen or who are exposed to a large number of movies portraying smokers are at a high risk of smoking initiation.”

But after 2010, despite the accumulating evidence, the rate of cinematic smoking started to rise in those youth-rated movies, according to the new study, published this month in the C.D.C.’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which looked at incidents of tobacco use in top-grossing movies from 2010 to 2016.

As far as movies rated G, PG, and PG-13, “When we compared 2010 to 2016, there was a slight decrease in the number of movies, but an increase in the number of incidents,” said Michael Tynan, a public health analyst in the office on smoking and health at the C.D.C., and the lead author of the new study. Dr. Glantz is also an author, and he and two of the four other authors have received grants from the Truth Initiative, an antismoking group.

The number of times that an actor used a tobacco product in a top-grossing movie “increased 72 percent among all movies and 43 percent among PG-13 movies,” Mr. Tynan said. In other words, he said, by 2016 there were “more tobacco incidents concentrated in fewer movies.”

One out of every four movies rated for youth today continues to feature tobacco use, Mr. Tynan said, “and we know this is harmful to youth and causes youth to start using tobacco.”

And the policies that the studios have in place, which seemed to be working as of 2012, are clearly not sufficient, Mr. Tynan said. “The frequency of tobacco use in PG-13 movies is a public health concern.” So what should be done? “One change is to rate movies with tobacco use with an R rating,” he suggested. Other steps that might help would be to have studios certify that there was no paid product placement, and to end the use of any actual tobacco brands on the screen. All of these strategies are supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has issued a statement calling the new study “alarming.”

In a study done back in the ’90s, researchers pointed to some of the differences between who smokes on screen and who smokes in the real world. In the real world, smokers are likely to be “poor people, people with mental illness,” Dr. Glantz said. “If you look at the power players, the rich people, people who are in control, they’re not smoking.” But in movies, it tends to be more desirable or powerful characters, even if they’re the bad guys, and in that way, movie images may reinforce images in cigarette advertising.

And movie images are powerful. In one experiment, young people who were smokers were shown montages of clips from recent movies; the participants were randomized so that some saw clips with smoking in them and some did not. Then they were given a 10-minute break, and the people who saw the smoking images were significantly more likely to smoke during the break than the smokers who had not seen the images.

“Keeping smoking onscreen is like putting arsenic in the popcorn,” Dr. Glantz said. The new study “shows they’ve taken half of the arsenic out,” he said. “Now they need to take the rest out.”

In fact, the trend has caught on so rampantly that it’s set to outsell traditional cigarettes by the end of 2023!

With the FDA regulating these products since 2016, it comes as no surprise that vaping is due to become the norm, surpassing traditional smoking in time to come.

In a report on the use of e-cigarettes in Canada, a report previously stated that “Among those whose primary reason for use is to help to quit tobacco, a similar proportion no longer smoke (24%), and this may be considered the success rate for this method of smoking cessation.”

How is vaping different from smoking?

To differentiate itself from tobacco products, vaping is the process of smoking nicotine without inhaling the other harmful substances in tobacco—out of which there 70 known carcinogens. Some products contain little to no nicotine in them. Canada for instance still does not approve of nicotine-containing e-cigarettes.

These battery-powered devices heat the liquid that contains nicotine and/or other flavours, which in turn is inhaled as the vapour.

There is no smoke without fire, however

Since the key objective of switching to e-cigarettes is to cut down the number of cigarettes you smoke, researchers have been assessing the ‘relative harm’ vaping can cause to your tissues.

A study conducted by Jessica Wang-Rodriguez, a head and neck cancer specialist at the University of California at San Diego and her team found that cells lining human organs sustained up to twice the DNA damage seen in unexposed cells. They were also five to 10 times more likely to wither and die than unexposed cells even if the vapour contained no nicotine, the addictive ingredient in conventional and most electronic cigarettes, as reported in New Scientist.

“Without the nicotine, the damage is slightly less, but still statistically significant compared with control cells,” says Wang-Rodriguez, who led the research.

The toxins from the flavouring are another cause of concern

“E-cigarette vapour is known to contain a range of toxins which include impurities in the e-cigarette liquids and toxins generated when solutions are heated to generate vapour,” says John Britton, a toxicologist at the University of Nottingham, UK. “Some are carcinogenic, so it’s likely some long-term users of e-cigarettes will experience adverse effects on their health, and the authors fo the study conducted by Rodriguez and company are correct to point out that these products should not be considered risk-free,” he says. But if smokers can’t give up completely, e-cigarettes are safer than smoking, he says, as reported in New Scientist.

They caused considerable damage to your key blood vessels; similar to normal cigarettes

A study conducted by researchers at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Rome states that vaping has an impact similar to the what normal cigarettes have on the stiffening of you heart’s aorta, as reported the Independent, UK.

The lead researcher, Professor Charalambos Viachopoulos of the University of Athens said, “We measured aortic stiffness. If the aorta is stiff you multiply your risk of dying, either from heart diseases or from other causes. “There could be long-term heart dangers. They are far more dangerous than people realise.”

The problem lies with the rising number of teens taking to smoking E-cigarettes

A 2014 high school survey conducted in the US found that 17 percent of 12th graders reported the use of e-cigarettes compared to 14 percent who smoked traditional cigarettes. The lower price points at which they are promoted, their perception of being safer than traditional cigarettes, the various flavours they come in and the fact they’re in trend make it a very attractive option for the youth.

Adolescents and young adults who try e-cigarettes are more than three times as likely to take up smoking traditional cigarettes as their peers who haven’t tried the devices, states a recent research review published in Reuters Health.

E-cigarette use, or vaping, was as least as strong a risk factor for smoking traditional cigarettes as having a parent or sibling who smokes or having a risk-taking and thrill-seeking personality, the researchers found.

“E-cigarette use among teens and young adults could increase the future burden of tobacco by creating a new generation of adult smokers who might have otherwise not begun smoking,” said lead study author Samir Soneji of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice in New Hampshire.

“To the extent that e-cigarette use mimics the behaviour of smoking a cigarette—handling the e-cigarette, the action of puffing, and the inhalation of smoke—it sets the adolescent up for easily transitioning to smoking,” added Soneji. “Like transitioning from driving a Tesla to driving a Chevy.”

Dr Brian Primack, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh stated that “Young people report that there is a lot of pressure among e-cigarette only users to smoke a ‘real’ cigarette,” Primack said by email. “It may be somewhat analogous to the fact that teens who use flavoured alcohol are often pressured socially to step up their game to harder forms of alcohol.”

Although e-cigarettes claim to be less harmful than conventional cigarettes it could make sense to pay heed to the lack of conclusive long-term evidence

Cigarette smokers are well aware of the perils of smoking normal cigarettes. The New England Journal of Medicine states that smoking tobacco reduces your life span by at least 10 years. But studies on smoking e-cigarettes remain largely inconclusive.

A review of studies published in the journal Tobacco Control reveals that the long-term effects of the vaporised form are not known yet. For instance, it is not known if the chemical propylene glycol, which is mixed with the other chemicals in e-cigarettes known to irritate the respiratory tract, could result in lung problems after decades of vaping, says Dr Michael Siegel, a tobacco researcher and professor of community health sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health in Live Science.

Besides, “because e-cigarettes have been on the market for only about 10 years, there have been no long-term studies of people who have used them for 30 to 40 years. Therefore, the full extent of e-cigs’ effects on heart and lung health, as well as their cancer-causing potential, over time is not known,” says Stanton Glantz a professor of medicine and the director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco to Live Science.

ANTI-TOBACCO advocate Professor Dr Judith Longstaff Mackay has been identified as ‘one of the three most dangerous people in the world’ by the industry. She was instrumental in developing the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. In her recent visit to Malaysia, she shares her experience campaigning against tobacco in Asia since 1984.

“I HAVE been described as a ‘psychotic human garbage, a gibbering Satan, an insane psychotic, power-lusting piece of meat, Hitler and a nanny’ and they (the tobacco industry allies) threatened to destroy me. But such threats and offensive words never once diverted me from my cause,” says Professor Dr Judith Longstaff Mackay.

Dr Mackay, 73, wears many hats. The World Health Organisation (WHO) senior policy adviser is also senior adviser to Vital Strategies, part of the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco and director of the Asian Consultancy on Tobacco Control.

Her recent visit was part of her capacity as a visiting professor at the University Malaya Centre of Addiction Sciences.

A recipient of British Medical Journal Lifetime Achievement Award (2009) and a Special Award for Outstanding Contribution on Tobacco Control (2014), she has published 200 papers, and addressed over 460 conferences on tobacco control.

Dr Mackay has received many international awards in recognition of her contribution on tobacco control. She was selected as one of Time’s 60 Asian Heroes (2006) and of Time’s 100 World’s Most Influential People (2007).

Question: Born in Britain, you moved to Hong Kong in 1967 after earning a medical degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1966. What led to your resignation as a physician in 1984, and then becoming a leading campaigner and advocate for tobacco control for the last 30 years?

Answer: I had a complete career change from cure to prevention and there were three main reasons for making the shift.

First, when I was working in a hospital in Hong Kong, we had a maxim on our male medical wards that every person we admitted was a smoker with tobacco illnesses, like heart diseases, cancer and chronic chest problems, which were often too late and too advanced to be cured.

I realised we had to go a step “higher upstream” to prevent this rather than merely providing the ambulance services at the end-stage.

I came to feel that hospital medicine was important but it works like a band-aid in comparison with prevention.

You may be able to save hundreds of lives in a lifetime in hospital medicine, but millions of lives could be saved if you work in prevention. It is a completely different ball game, and yet the money, prestige and attention all go to curative medicine; and that is similar around the world.

Second, was the realisation that although women’s health those days was defined very gynaecologically, more women were being killed by tobacco than by every method of contraception combined. I was particularly concerned that the tobacco industry was enticing women with promises of beauty, fame, emancipation and freedom.

The third reason was that the tobacco industry felt Asia was theirs for the taking.

They said it themselves — when asked about their future in the 1980s, “What do we want? We want Asia”.

Q: Why did the tobacco industry had their eyes set on Asia?

A: They wanted the huge populations and the large number of men already smoking who could be persuaded to smoke their brands of cigarettes.

They galloped into Asia with the dream of converting the 60 per cent of men who smoked local cigarettes to switch to international brands, and the second dream of persuading Asian women to start smoking. If this happened, their markets would be enormous.

It would not matter if every smoker in Britain stopped smoking tomorrow if they could capture the massive Asian markets.

Also, Asia was becoming more affluent, so, it was easier for people to afford cigarettes.

Thirdly, when I wrote an article in the South China Morning Post on banning cigarette advertising, a tobacco giant came down on me and labelled me as “entirely unrepresentative and unaccountable”.

The tobacco industry claimed that they were the best source of information on tobacco and they even said it has not been proven that “illness was actually caused by smoking”.

I was so outraged that it was just one of those tipping points in life in 1984. Everything came together and I realised that I really had to work on prevention rather than cure.

Ever since, I have been working principally with governments on the policy level to try and get the tax and the laws in place in tobacco control.

Q: You are known as one of the three most dangerous people in the world by the tobacco industry. What do you have to say about this?

A: Well yes, I’m proud of that. The reason that I got that title was essentially location. I happen to be in Asia and the tobacco companies wanted Asia. They saw this region as their future, but I set about thwarting their goals.

I went early on to countries like China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Vietnam and Cambodia and more recently to North Korea upon learning that British American Tobacco had gone into the country to get laws in place.

Q: In campaigning against tobacco use, what are some of the challenges you have faced?

A: I have had many problems, and was subjected to verbal abuse and even had death threats from allies of the tobacco industry.

Twice, I was threatened by the tobacco industry publicly, saying they would take me to court.

Nothing came of it, so it was either an attempt to intimidate me or to cast doubt on my credibility in the minds of the public.

In a television interview in South Africa, I openly said “I’m not a suicidal type, and if I were to be found knocked down by a bus, you need to find out if the tobacco industry is behind it before you look anywhere else.” And the industry was apparently furious with me for saying that.

However, their tactic now is not so much to attack people individually, but to threaten governments.

They threaten them under Constitutional Law on the rights of their products to advertise, and on freedom of speech and they attack them under trade treaties.

This is intimidating to governments and it can cost anything up to US$50 million (RM214 million) to fight these threats.

Q: You were one of the key persons in formulating the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the first international treaty on public health. Malaysia is currently drafting the Control of Tobacco and Smoking Bill after lobbying for it since 2004 and they have sought your expertise. What do you have to say about this?

A: If you look at Malaysia and Hong Kong, many of the things that these two jurisdictions have done in the last 30 years are similar, yet Hong Kong has managed to half its male smoking rate.

Hong Kong is down to 10 per cent smokers now, whereas prevalence rates in Malaysia have not really decreased (at around 22.8 per cent). I understand it is not something that can be done overnight.

But the fact that the prevalence has not decreased is either because the excise tax imposed on cigarettes is not high enough, or that the laws that have been passed are not being enforced. In the case of the tobacco bill, the tobacco industry has been an unseen hand behind the scenes.

Q: The Health Ministry plans to increase prices of cigarettes from RM17 to RM21.50 in the near future to deter people from smoking. Several industry players were quick to say that increasing the tax would only lead to increased sales of illicit cigarettes. Is this true? What is the link between the increase in excise tax and contraband cigarettes?

A: There is zero truth in this. This sounds to me suspiciously just like what the tobacco industry would say. Economists, tax, finance and customs officials know, or they should know, that putting up a tobacco tax is not related to any increase in smuggling.

Our Customs chief in Hong Kong, for example, had said quite categorically there is no relationship between the amount of tax that is put in place and smuggling, and that is the position of the WHO too. But the tobacco industry keeps repeating it so often that some governments have come to believe it.

This is one of their tactics. A United States-based non-governmental organisation (NGO) has been going around the world, saying “don’t put up the tax, otherwise, there will be a rise in illicit cigarettes”. What many governments do not realise is that it is funded by the tobacco industry.

Q: WHO proposes that the tax imposed on cigarettes should be at least 75 per cent of the retail price. How efficient would this be in reducing smoking prevalence particularly among Malaysia’s young as compared with other measures, such as school education programmes?

A: Ten experts from around the world were present at a conference held in Hong Kong and, each speaker was asked “If you have one thing to do in tobacco control, what would that be?” and every single one said “tax”. This is because higher prices make cigarettes unaffordable to young people.

Taxation is the most effective approach to controlling the spread of tobacco. Creating smoke-free areas is the second measure, followed by things like advertising bans and smoking cessation.

Some people say health education in schools is crucial. Certainly, everybody likes health education, but it has not been proven effective in bringing down the prevalence of youth smoking.

And you can tell it is not effective because the tobacco industry does not oppose it. They oppose tax increases, plain packaging and smoke-free areas. And because the tobacco industry fights them, we know these are the measures that work.

Q: What needs to be done to improve our health education programmes at schools?

A: School health promotion programmes do not work because traditionally they say that if you smoke, you will get cancer when you are 60 years or heart attack when you are 70 years. If you are only a 11-year-old child, it is totally meaningless.

We need to do much more to revitalise and revamp health promotion and health education. Smoking and non-smoking youth have, in fact, the same level of health knowledge about the harms of smoking. The difference between the two groups is whether they think smoking is cool or a dirty expensive habit.

We have got to make it attractive to be a non-smoker in the teenage years.

Q: The Control of Tobacco and Smoking Bill currently being drafted would see the minimum age for buying cigarettes raised to 21 years old, ban on displaying tobacco products and making it illegal to smoke in vehicles with children inside, among others. How effective would this be in tackling smoking prevalence?

A: (People aged) 8 to 23 years is a vulnerable period. If you can stop children from smoking at this age, they are less likely to smoke. Whereas before that, they do not have the kind of mature judgment to analyse what it will mean to actually smoke.

The tobacco industry is very interested in youth and young adults because one has to only smoke 100 cigarettes and he or she will become lifelong smokers. It is so addictive.

Q: Besides health effects, what are the other impacts of cigarette smoking to the country and its people?

A: Two out of every three smokers die from cigarette smoking, so, you are losing skilled workers. One in every three fires in the world is caused by careless smoking.

There is also loss of productivity. Smokers go out for seven minutes to smoke. So, that’s seven minutes every time they smoke. Smokers are sicker and die on average a decade before non-smokers, so families lose their bread-winner.

There are medical and health costs. There is smoke damage to buildings and fabric.

And then there is a massive cost of cleaning up all the litter, billions of cigarette ends, packets, matches and lighters that are discarded every day in the world.

The tobacco industry claims that tobacco control would harm workers and farmers. This is not true. We have got so many projects now, including right in the heart of tobacco-growing in China showing that if farmers grow alternative crops they actually earn more.

The second fallacy is that if restaurants go smoke-free, they would lose revenue. Nowhere in the world has that happened. The revenue, including in Hong Kong and California, where they have introduced smoke-free policies, has gone up and not down.

Another fallacy is the government would lose money if it puts up the tax.

This does not happen. Some smokers will still pay more for cigarettes, so the revenue goes up. The number of smokers will come down particularly among the young and the poor.

There are so many economic fallacies that some non-governmental organisations propagate. Sometimes, governments almost innocently believe these economic arguments.

Q: If the situation is so dire, why can’t countries impose a blanket ban on cigarettes?

A: No country has put a blanket ban on cigarettes. Authorities have learnt from the prohibition of alcohol in the United States (1920-1933), for example, that it leads to much bigger implications particularly with crime and corruption cases.

So, the idea is to slowly push tobacco use back, so that the reduction is genuine and it is done throughout the community. This is what every government is really trying to do rather than actually ban it.

Q: Malaysia aims to be smoke-free (the End Game of Tobacco) by 2045. Are we moving in the right direction?

A: I strongly commend Malaysia for the foresight in establishing the 2045 goal and targets; few countries have yet to do this.

Recently the prevalence of male smokers has begun to decrease.

It is going to require a major commitment by the government and a huge effort by academia as well as non-governmental organisations in achieving this goal.

The Health Ministry has worked out a year-by-year plan of reducing prevalence up to 2045. It has developed a roadmap and has filled in what needs to be done each year to achieve the goal.

But it is not a quick process: if a country reduces its prevalence by one per cent a year, it is doing quite well.

Most smokers in China, the world’s largest tobacco consumer, have no intention of kicking the habit and remain unaware of some of its most damaging health effects, Chinese health officials and outside researchers said Wednesday.

http://www.voanews.com/a/china-smoking/3879050.html

An estimated 316 million people smoke in China, almost a quarter of the population, and concerns are growing about the long-term effects on public health and the economy.

The vast majority of smokers are men, of whom 59 percent told surveyors that they have no plans to quit, according to a decade-long study by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and Canadian researchers with the International Tobacco Control project.

Such numbers have prompted efforts to restrict the formerly ubiquitous practice. Major cities including Beijing and Shanghai having recently moved to ban public smoking, with Shanghai’s prohibition going into effect in March. In 2015, the central government approved a modest nationwide cigarette tax increase.

But Chinese and international health officials argue that more is needed, including a nationwide public smoking ban, higher cigarette taxes and more aggressive health warnings. Such actions are “critically important,” Yuan Jiang, director of tobacco control for the Chinese Center for Disease Control, said in a statement released with Wednesday’s study.

A public smoking ban appeared imminent last year. The government health ministry said in December that it would happen by the end of 2016, but that has yet to materialize.

“They have to figure out what’s important as a health policy,” said Geoffrey Fong of Canada’s University of Waterloo, one of the authors of Wednesday’s study. “Every third man that you pass on the street in China will die of cigarettes. …When you have cheap cigarettes, people will smoke them.”

In line with global trends, smoking rates among Chinese have fallen slowly over the past 25 years, by about 1 percent annually among men and 2.6 percent among women, according to a separate study published in April in the medical journal The Lancet.

Yet because of China’s population growth — 1.37 billion people at last count — the actual number of smokers has continued to increase. Rising prosperity means cigarettes have become more affordable, while low taxes keep the cost of some brands at less than $1 a pack.

Sixty percent of Chinese smokers were unaware that cigarettes can lead to strokes and almost 40 percent weren’t aware that smoking causes heart disease, according to the study, which was released on World No Tobacco Day, when the World Health Organization and others highlight health risks associated with tobacco use.

Judith Mackay, an anti-tobacco advocate based in Hong Kong, said China has made strides with the public smoking bans in some cities and a similar ban covering schools and universities, but that’s not enough.

“This is the first time there has been a report looking at the overall picture of where China stands,” said Mackay, senior adviser at Vital Strategies, a global health organization. “The reality is, it’s falling behind.”

Mackay blamed behind the scenes lobbying by China’s state-owned tobacco monopoly for impeding efforts to toughen tobacco policies. The State Tobacco Monopoly Administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Government agencies and research institutes in China, Canada and the United States funded the study.

World No Tobacco Day 2017: Beating tobacco for health, prosperity, the environment and national development

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2017/no-tobacco-day/en/

Action to stamp out tobacco use can help countries prevent millions of people falling ill and dying from tobacco-related disease, combat poverty and, according to a first-ever WHO report, reduce large-scale environmental degradation.

On World No Tobacco Day 2017, WHO is highlighting how tobacco threatens the development of nations worldwide, and is calling on governments to implement strong tobacco control measures. These include banning marketing and advertising of tobacco, promoting plain packaging of tobacco products, raising excise taxes, and making indoor public places and workplaces smoke-free.

Tobacco’s health and economic costs

Tobacco use kills more than 7 million people every year and costs households and governments over US$ 1.4 trillion through healthcare expenditure and lost productivity.

Dr Chan adds: “But by taking robust tobacco control measures, governments can safeguard their countries’ futures by protecting tobacco users and non-users from these deadly products, generating revenues to fund health and other social services, and saving their environments from the ravages tobacco causes.”

All countries have committed to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which aims to strengthen universal peace and eradicate poverty. Key elements of this agenda include implementing the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, and by 2030 reducing by one third premature death from noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), including heart and lung diseases, cancer, and diabetes, for which tobacco use is a key risk factor.

Tobacco scars the environment

The first-ever WHO report, Tobacco and its environmental impact: an overview, also shows the impact of this product on nature, including:

Tobacco smoke emissions contribute thousands of tons of human carcinogens, toxicants, and greenhouse gases to the environment. And tobacco waste is the largest type of litter by count globally.

Up to 10 billion of the 15 billion cigarettes sold daily are disposed in the environment.

Cigarette butts account for 30–40% of all items collected in coastal and urban clean-ups.

Tobacco threatens women, children, and livelihoods

Tobacco threatens all people, and national and regional development, in many ways, including:

Poverty: Around 860 million adult smokers live in low- and middle-income countries. Many studies have shown that in the poorest households, spending on tobacco products often represents more than 10% of total household expenditure – meaning less money for food, education and healthcare.

Children and education: Tobacco farming stops children attending school. 10%–14% of children from tobacco-growing families miss class because of working in tobacco fields.

Women: 60%–70% of tobacco farm workers are women, putting them in close contact with often hazardous chemicals.

“Many governments are taking action against tobacco, from banning advertising and marketing, to introducing plain packaging for tobacco products, and smoke-free work and public places,” says Dr Oleg Chestnov, WHO’s Assistant Director-General for NCDs and Mental Health. “But one of the least used, but most effective, tobacco control measures to help countries address development needs is through increasing tobacco tax and prices.”

Governments collect nearly US$ 270 billion in tobacco excise tax revenues each year, but this could increase by over 50%, generating an additional US$ 141 billion, simply from raising taxes on cigarettes by just US$ 0.80 per pack (equivalent to one international dollar) in all countries. Increased tobacco taxation revenues will strengthen domestic resource mobilization, creating the fiscal space needed for countries to meet development priorities under the 2030 Agenda.

“Tobacco is a major barrier to development globally;” says Dr Douglas Bettcher, Director of WHO’s Department for the Prevention on NCDs. “Tobacco-related death and illness are drivers of poverty, leaving households without breadwinners, diverting limited household resources to purchase tobacco products rather than food and school materials, and forcing many people to pay for medical expenses.”

“But action to control it will provide countries with a powerful tool to protect their citizens and futures,” Dr Bettcher adds.

Editor’s note

Tobacco-related illness is one of the biggest public health threats the world faces, killing more than 7 million people a year. But tobacco use is one of the largest preventable causes of noncommunicable diseases.

Tobacco control represents a powerful tool in improving health in communities and in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDG target 3.4 is to reduce premature deaths from NCDs by one third by 2030, including cardiovascular and chronic respiratory diseases, cancers, and diabetes.

Another SDG target, 3.a, calls for implementation of the WHO Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC). The WHO FCTC entered into force in 2005, and its Parties are obliged to take a number of steps to reduce demand and supply for tobacco products. Actions addressed in the Convention include protecting people from exposure to tobacco smoke; banning tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship; banning sales to minors; requiring health warnings on tobacco packaging; promoting tobacco cessation; increasing tobacco taxes; and creating a national coordinating mechanism for tobacco control. There are 180 Parties to the Convention.

Smoking and other tobacco use kills more than seven million people each year, the World Health Organization said Tuesday, also warning of the dire environmental impact of tobacco production, distribution and waste.

The UN agency said tougher measures were needed to rein in tobacco use, urging countries to ban smoking in the workplace and indoor public spaces, outlaw marketing of tobacco products and hike cigarette prices.

“Tobacco threatens us all,” WHO chief Margaret Chan said in a statement.

In a report released ahead of World No Tobacco Day on Wednesday, WHO warned that the annual death toll of seven million people had jumped from four million at the turn of the century, making tobacco the world’s single biggest cause of preventable death.

And the death toll is expected to keep rising, with WHO bracing for more than one billion deaths this century.

“By 2030, more than 80 percent of the deaths will occur in developing countries, which have been increasingly targeted by tobacco companies seeking new markets to circumvent tightening regulation in developed nations.”

Tobacco use also brings an economic cost: WHO estimates that it drains more than $1.4 trillion (1.3 trillion euros) from households and governments each year in healthcare expenditures and lost productivity, or nearly two percent of the global gross domestic product.

In addition to the health and economic costs linked to smoking, the WHO report for the first time delved into the environmental impact of everything from tobacco production to the cigarette butts and other waste produced by smokers.

“From start to finish, the tobacco life cycle is an overwhelmingly polluting and damaging process,” WHO Assistant Director-General Oleg Chestnov said in the report.

The report detailed how growing tobacco often requires large quantities of fertilisers and pesticides, and it warned that tobacco farming had become the main cause of deforestation in several countries.

This is largely due to the amount of wood needed for curing tobacco, with WHO estimating that one tree is needed for every 300 cigarettes produced.

WHO also highlighted the pollution generated during the production, transport and distribution of tobacco products.

The report estimates that the industry emits nearly four million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent annually — the same as around three million transatlantic flights.

And waste from the process contains over 7,000 toxic chemicals that poison the environment, including human carcinogens, WHO said.

Once in the hands of the consumer, tobacco smoke emissions spewed thousands of tonnes of human carcinogens, toxic substances and greenhouse gases into the environment.

Cigarette butts and other tobacco waste make up the largest number of individual pieces of litter in the world, the agency said.

Two thirds of the 15 billion cigarettes sold each day are thrown on to the street or elsewhere in the environment, it said, adding that butts account for up to 40 percent of all items collected in coastal and urban clean-ups.

WHO urged governments to take strong measures to rein in tobacco use.

“One of the least used, but most effective tobacco control measures… is through increasing tobacco tax and prices,” Chestnov said.